That is good phase. The bad phase is when those people eventually disappear and you have hard time to connect with anyone new.

I gave you two disciplines: bulking up in the gym, or playing soccer...

while bulking up, you gain both muscle and some fat, and your soccer performance will suffer as your weight will increase, and your larger biceps and pecs really wont help your soccer game much (there is a reason that pro soccer players don't look like body builders). Also playing lots of soccer will hurt your 'gains'. (too much cardio is a 'gains' killer).

On the other side, while 'cutting', to be leaner, you are running on a calorie deficit for multiple weeks, or months, and your soccer performance will suffer since you are so glycogen depleted.....

You can be good at both, but not the "best you can be" at both disciplines at the same time as optimizing for one, will hurt your other one, and that's just physics.

Hope that makes sense....

Being at a slight deficit won't hurt your soccer performance. You're not a top tier professional that needs to optimize for every tiny thing. Even if you are, Ronaldo is shredded and is a top 5 footballer. And most footballers are naturally very lean, so what you're saying doesn't even make empirical sense.

Should you expect to play the Champion's League finals while preparing to do poses at a bodybuilding show and do your best? No, but you could conceivably do these a few weeks apart.

Cardiovascular activity won't "kill your gains", there's no such consensus, you just have to be smart about your caloric intake.

There's no physical law involved here so saying it's "just physics" sounds very dismissive.

All these examples are very poor, bending reality to prove cliche folk wisdom, it’s actually kinda funny.

Conscious hedonism is the only way to live, but you better be willing to be conscious, cause doing what you "want" sucks until you get good at it.

Being able to say "No", and being willing to let people down because there are things you need to do that are more important than them, is a really important skill when you're running a startup.

You can't succeed if you're giving up all your time to other people's things. You have to stop and tell them you won't do what they're asking because you're focusing on your own stuff. They will complain. Some of them will stop talking to you. You might really annoy your family. Your real friends will understand and still be there when you're finished. Some of them might happily come along and help you with what you're doing.

Relationships are one of the most important things in life, and I say this as a guy who could litteraly not talk to anyone for two weeks strait. It's relationships with people that get you your first customers for your start-up, your key employees. relationships keep you down to earth, friends and fmily. The latter being one of the most important elements in your life, your kids and spouse.

Why am I saying this? Because relationships go both ways. When you care about people, chances are some of them will care about you as well. And if you don't really care about your customers, your company is screwed anyway.

Granted, everyone has a different bandwidth to handle these relationships, and seperating the toxic ones from the rest is problem. Which makes relationships all the more important.